#parts: the clonus horror

[frankentyner]

Keenan Wynn was awesome as Winter, the magician formerly known as The Winter Warlock in Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. He handles it so well when Santa, after having known him for like 50 years once again calls him Mr. Warlock. For the thousandth time he calmly replies, "Winter, please.".

[yetihideout]

Parts: The Clonus Horror, 1979

[babyspacebatclone]

Spontaneously remembered this. Exceptionally relevant:

Thoughts from David Slack on 'AI' and copyright

(the voice theft in particular is really depressing)

[mst3kgifs]

They're all probably sitting around on their butts playing Candyland.

[movieposters1]

[spookyfoxdreamer]

[bananacorn-limeade]

some "social commentary" about how we bag and freeze people in america

he's sealed for our protection. found in savers, RI

[b-movieenema]

Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979)

This week, clones run wild as B-Movie Enema takes a look at 1979's Parts: The Clonus Horror.

Welcome to a new review here at B-Movie Enema. It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I proudly call myself a MSTie. One of the great things about MST3K is the fact that it often exposed people to movies or shorts that they wouldn’t have known anything about. Granted, there are some more popular movies they covered on the Satellite of Love like a Gamera movie or a couple…

[casterwolflena]

Wolf Trek: Justice

Captain’s log, stardate 78965.4: “When Wesley Crusher is condemned to die on an idyllic, primitive planet, Captain Picard must face breaking the Prime Directive to save the boy’s life.” In which the Enterprise crew arrives on a planet that looks suspiciously like the clone compound featured in the infamously bad Robert Fiveson flick, Parts: The Clonus Horror. If you’ve seen Mystery Science…

[lowkeynando]

from their injuries. The novel also features a Frankenstein-like theme of a man assembled entirely from the body parts of others.

In Sui Ishida's 2014 dark fantasy manga series, Tokyo Ghoul, a state sanctioned organ transplant is performed between an unwilling donor and the main character of the series. It was the subject of much controversy in the series itself. Unbeknown to the surgeons however, the unwilling donor was a ghoul, a monster who eats human flesh, causing the main character to have ghoul-like characteristics. The idea of state-sanctioned involuntary organ transplants is taken one step further by the concept of creating people solely for the purpose of acting as organ donors.

Generally, these donors are clones of their eventual organ recipients. This idea has been explored by several writers.

The 1979 science fiction horror film Parts: The Clonus Horror, written by Bob Sullivan and Ron Smith, is set in an isolated community in a remote desert area, where clones are bred to serve as a source of replacement organs for the wealthy and powerful. The clones are kept in a seemingly idyllic environment of apparent leisure and luxury, right up to the point where they are killed for their organs.

Michael Marshall Smith's novel Spares has a similar premise. Unlike the clones in Parts: The Clonus Horror, the clones are kept in conditionsJUNGLEWOODNETHERRACKAAAAAAAANETHERWARTENCHANTMENTTABLEAAAAAAAAAACHORUSFLOWERREDSTONEREPEARERAAAAAAAAREDSTONECOMPARATORTRiPWiREHOOKAAAAAAACOMMANDBLOCKSTiCKYPiSTONALiENSSPECiESAAFAiRiESDEiTiESGODSCLOWNSROBOTSANDROiDSARTiFiCiALiNTELLiGENCESBRAiNSPOWERSAAAAAAiNTELLiGENCEQUOTiENTSWORMSTAPEWORMSATUBESTUMORSCANCERSHOSTSENTiTiESFUNGiSAPARASiTESBACTERiASMiCROORGANiSMSAAAAAAMUSHROOMSSURGERiESSCiENCESPHYSiCSAAAAAWiTCHCHCRAFTSMAGiCSVOODOOSHOODOOSAAAWiZARDSWARLOCKSCULTSSECRETSOCiETiESAAAALTEREGOSiNNERDEMONSCROSSROADDEMONSAMEDiCALTREATMENTS CLONES

[freezing-kaiju]

Parts: the Clonus Horror was objectively a better film when recorded on a phone camera than usual due to the phone camera slipping making some shots more dynamic. Bizarrely dull-yet-interesting film with a lot of really cool directing and chooting choices that just do not cohere into a whole

wait guys. reblog this and tell me what the last movie you watched was. bonus points if you add a short review <333

[contentabnormal]

This week on Content Abnormal we present Keenan Wynn in the Suspense thriller “The Night Reveals”!

[mst3kgifs]

An unqualified success, so long as no one looks directly at your face.

[stumpyshocky]

Thinking about doing sketch pages for mst3k episodes. Not that I don't already have other projects I'm supposed to be doing (fursona requests, an oc request for a dear friend you know who you are) but like...what's one more (10 more) projects?

Gonna start with Parts: the Clonus Horror bc I need to draw that sad wet little clone who is the embodiment of aheem aheem whimper.

Back on my mst3k bullshit. Thinking about 12 To The Moon again and how cats literally saved the human race bc the aliens were like wtf we love cats now.

[dailymst3kquote]

¡AGUA!

Cuervo T. Robot

[mst3kproject]

811: Parts: the Clonus Horror

When The Island came out in 2005, the makers of Parts sued Dreamworks and reached a settlement for some millions of dollars. There are rumors that the film-makers were reluctant to actually bring the case, since they’d kind of hoped everybody forgot about this movie. If that’s true, they never had a chance. MSTies never forget.

Clonus is a high-security facility funded by Adidas, which raises clones so that their organs can be harvested for transplantation.  After a rigorous physical fitness program, successful clones are told it’s time to go to Disneyland or something, and are then frozen and packaged. One day, a clone named Richard is inspired by an empty can of Old Milwaukee to investigate the ugly truth behind his world, and manages to escape Clonus and reach a city, where he kinda wanders around lost until a old man finds him.  This guy is a retired journalist, who might be able to blow the lid off the whole Clonus project, as long as the company’s thugs don’t find them first.

My first thought on this movie is that I haven’t seen this much product placement since Mac and Me.

My second thought is that this is all extremely impractical. You’ve got this giant facility with hundreds of clones, all of whom need to be raised, educated, fed, exercised, clothed, cured when they’re sick, housed, entertained, etcetera… this would require hundreds more if not thousands of staff!  What’s the payoff?  Somebody gets a liver in forty years?  Right, but you’d have to have your clone made while you’re still fairly young if they’re going to be mature by the time you’re old and sick, and then what if you never need a liver?  That’s a whole clone gone to waste there.  What if you die in a car accident without ever using your clone?  Do they just throw it out?  What if your clone dies before you do?  Do you get your money back?  Peter Graves talks about immortality through unlimited spare parts, but that’s not how that works… what if you have a stroke?  You can’t replace your brain with a clone’s.

I have way more questions.  Why are Richard and Lina different from the others?  They’re ‘control’ clones, but what variables are the scientists controlling for?  The ‘normal’ clones don’t seem that much different, just more complacent.  If the clones aren’t supposed to know they’re being watched then why do the ‘guides’ talk into microphones right in front of them?  What do the clones think is going on when an airplane flies over?

How do they keep this all a secret from the outside world?  The staff must sign nondisclosure agreements and stuff, but do none of them ever have moral qualms and decide to talk?  Most of the people with clones seem to know they have clones.  They must have paid for it at some point.  Do none of them ever decide this is fucked-up and withdraw from the program?  What happens to their clone if they do?  Do they ever get the urge to meet their clone?  What if some narcissistic aging billionaire’s only child dies and they decide to adopt their clone as an heir… is that allowed?  If your relative needs a liver and you’d be a close match but need to keep yours, can you donate your clone’s?

I think I just wrote six movies more interesting than this one, because Parts: the Clonus Horror is really, really boring.  The first half of the movie is bland clones leading their bland lives in bland surroundings.  I’m aware that’s supposed to be the point: the clones themselves are encouraged to be kind of dim and dull so that their keepers don’t get attached to them, and their lives are not very dramatic because stress would harm them.  The Clonus facilities look like the world’s most boring wellness retreat because that’s exactly what they are.  Fair enough, but you don’t have to show that to us in a way that bores the audience.  Clonus doesn’t look like any fun, but it doesn’t look worth avoiding, either.  Nothing that happens makes us feel like we know Richard and Lina as people, and so it’s hard to care about what happens to them.

It also undercuts the movie’s point.  This is a film about human rights and how the rich and powerful are willing to violate them if it offers them some advantage. That’s an important thing to explore, but Parts does a terrible job because we don’t see the clones as people. They don’t have interests, or ideas, or relationships, they just wander around looking like they’re gonna bump into things.  Richard’s curiosity and Lina’s journaling should make us like them, but it’s all so poorly-presented that we don’t care.

Part of this does come from the desire to show how the clones have been raised, but at lot of it is also bad writing, because the characters who are not clones aren’t any better.  Peter Graves, his brother, and Hairy Son Rick chat about the morality of the whole thing but none of them have what one might describe as a personality.  When they talk about the situation and its moral implications, they do so in a very ham-fisted way that’s talking to the audience far more than it is each other.  We don’t care enough about them to be interested in their decisions, their opinions, or even their deaths.  All the time that should have been spent getting us interested in these characters was wasted on clones jogging.

Guess what that makes Richard?  Yep, sure enough, he’s a Main Character Who Doesn’t Do Anything!  He doesn’t save his friends, he doesn’t save his girlfriend… he doesn’t even save himself.  Even worse, during the second half of the movie, when the action should be happening, Richard is not even a part of it.  Having escaped from Clonus he doesn’t know where he is and has no idea what to do next.  He places his fate in his original’s hands, and lets others take over.  The result may be the end of Clonus, but it is also the end of Richard and what few things he ever held dear.

I think Richard’s storyline might be an attempt to say something about the ‘hero’s journey’ trope, in which the Callow Youth sets out into the big, scary world to take on forces far greater than himself.  It’s hard to imagine anyone callower than Richard, who has never really experienced anything, but that inexperience is his undoing.  The outside world is just too big and scary for him, and having reached it, he just wants to go home.  When he gets there, however, he finds that home is not a place of safety.  He has not yet learned enough to know that it’s actually the worst place he could go.

If any of you remember Conquest, I was pretty sure that was an intentional subversion of the ‘inexperienced young hero saves the world’ trope.  In Parts, it feels like an accident.  The writing is just too amateurish to be trying to suggest anything so subtle. Richard questions his experiences and Peter Graves and his brother argue about the ethics of cloning, with all the nuance of Anakin Skywalker complaining about sand – which may be a bad example because that was at least an attempt at a metaphor, in a story that was intentionally about the hero’s journey gone horribly wrong.  The closest Parts comes to a metaphor is to use the cloning project as a symbol of everything the rich get away with, and that would have been inherent in the premise anyway.

Since the clones themselves are mere pawns and almost all the other characters are villains, this leaves Parts as a movie without a hero.  Richard certainly never does anything remotely heroic, the politicians are corrupt assholes, and Hairy Rick doesn’t know enough, himself, to know that taking Richard home will result in disaster (though at least he tried to help).  The only characters who really do something heroes would do are the retired reporter and his wife.  They do the right thing all the way through, trying to help this injured man on their doorstep and make sure the world finds out about something terrible, and they’re killed for their trouble.

You know what?  I’m not done asking questions yet.  What happened after the end of the movie, when the Clonus project was exposed?  Paul notes in the Amazing Colossal Transplanted Sci-Fi Channel Episode Guide that since the villains of the movie are rich old white men, they probably got their way regardless, but what if they didn’t?  What happened to all those clones?  They have no skills or real education, and have never had to take care of their own needs.  If they’re going to get jobs and apartments and so forth it’ll be a real steep learning curve.

Are the clones aware of sex?  When the two of them are making out at the beginning they say things like “I’ve grown accustomed to you” and “I like you touching me,��� which imply that they really have no idea what the logical conclusion is. Yet when Richard and Lina spend their night camping in the woods it’s implied that they went a little further than that.  I hate to praise The Island of all movies, but it at least dealt with some of this stuff!

What we’re left with in Parts: the Clonus Horror is another one of those annoying movies in which somebody had a really great idea and yet couldn’t be bothered to think it through properly before rushing to a final draft.  This is always a tragedy, because so many people put so much time, effort, and money into making a movie.  It’s a shame to see it wasted on something that is fundamentally unfinished.